ARTS

Architecture

Rocking on its foundations

Laurence Marks looks at the shaky future of the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture The Prince of Wales Institute of Archi- tecture occupies two Nash houses on the frontier between the chaste terraces of Regents Park and the turbulent commerce of Camden Town with its famous emblem of the Sod You school of architecture, Nick Grimshaw's Sainsbury supermarket, and its Dionysiac weekend incursions of punks.

It seems to be in trouble. The Prince founded it three years ago as a seminary 'to foster the value of tradition' and send out young missionaries who would discipline and transform the brash, late-20th-century townscape. Most of the criticism has come from professionals who always believed that he has too narrow and doctrinaire a view of present-day architecture to be a reliable educator. But some of it has begun to reflect the disenchantment of actual or potential allies previously sympathetic to his crusade.

`The associations are unfortunate,' says a leading art historian. 'Do we really need a royal academy of architecture in the 1990s? This fascination with classical architecture is not very healthy. It's an upmarket ver- sion of popular nostalgia. This summer's degree show was poor; and the Institute's not properly supported financially, so it's a rich kids' college.'

`The Institute's weakness is that it has marginalised itself,' says a leading architec- tural critic. 'You don't win battles, aesthet- ic or political, by sitting on the extremes but by occupying the middle ground. There are many sensitive modernist architects it ought to be applauding. It's out on a limb, and that's been disastrous. Over the years the more positive features of the Prince's vision, like community architecture and the Arts and Crafts tradition, have become subordinate within the Institute. It's been captured by the classicists who are now in the majority there.'

Dr Richard John, its director, prefers not to answer questions about the balance sheet. The latest accounts filed in the cen- tral registry at the Charity Commission are for the years 1990-92, before the Institute opened. These show that it had then received £3.5 million in donations. The King of Saudi Arabia subsequently con- tributed £2.5 million.

Its difficulty is clear enough, however; it has a small number of students and very high overheads, even though it rents its premises from the Crown Estate Commis- sioners for a peppercorn. Architects are more expensive to train than philosophers or economists. A big private graduate school like the Architectural Association subsidises every student by, probably, 112,000415,000 a year. At the Institute, with 54 students this term, the ratio between costs and fees is worse. The 50 per cent of the students who come from over- seas are charged on a higher scale, but many have part of their fees rebated.

`The Institute's in a serious mess,' says an insider. 'It's been leaking money like a grounded oil tanker for several years. It's enormously overstaffed administratively. There's no endowment fund and no Gov- ernment grant. At one stage, it was over- spending by £2 million a year.

`There's no crisis,' says Anthea Atha, the bursar. 'All we're having to do is make sure we conserve our resources. We've been cutting back, and now we're setting up an endowment fund. We've had to review the structure because we've grown with no real financial plan.' When the Institute was being mooted five years ago, some of the Prince's circle argued that it would be more effective as a think-tank. The Prince is said to have replied: 'No, we must have some- thing that people can see.'

The view that it has been captured by zealots is not entirely convincing. Its anti- modernist tone was there from the start in the Prince's rock 'em, sock 'em speech to the RIBA's centenary banquet at Hampton Court in 1984. It changed him overnight from a ceremonial figure into an authentic tribute of the people. In the process, two separate ideas became scrambled: his per- sonal dislike of the modernist aesthetic, 'Well, we can't sit here all day watching the world go by. which is not shared by most people, least of all the young who are apt to find new mate- rials and structural techniques liberating rather than threatening; and his attack on the arrogance, shoddiness and heartless- ness of post-war redevelopment schemes, about which hardly anyone disagrees.

He has never disentangled them satisfac- torily. His 1989 book A Vision of Britain illustrates only three modernist designs: Michael Hopkins's Mount Stand at Lords, I.M. Pei's group of pyramids at the Louvre, and (grudgingly) Jan Utzon's Sydney Opera House. The Prince is a brilliant pamphleteer. The responsibilities of educa- tors are broader than those of a polemicist, however. One might have expected the Institute to be less parti pris. But both ideas are embedded in its curriculum. It focuses on well-made buildings and harmonious planning. At the same time, it seems obsessed with the past.

`We're an expression of the Prince's ideas,' Dr John says. 'We're his riposte to those who wrongly believe that he simply speaks out negatively. There are 36 other schools of architecture in Britain teaching the language of modernism. We don't need to add to that number. It boils down to a question of pluralism. You can achieve it by every school being pluralist or, equally, by every school pursuing its own philosophy.'

This sounds limiting. Are the students to believe that the desired, 'crucial dimension of spirit' (the prospectus) is absent from Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, that `scale, proportion and harmony' (ditto) are wanting in Mies's Barcelona pavilion, or that the elegant and joyous Hampshire schools designed under Colin Stansfield Smith's direction in the 1970s and 1980s lack 'human values' (ditto)? It's a bit like teaching a creative writing course without mentioning James, Chekhov and Joyce.

'I wouldn't deny that there are good modernist buildings,' says Dr John. 'But I think modernism requires great genius in a way that the traditional approaches we teach do not. It's in the nature of tradition that it's tremendously easy for practitioners to learn.'

The Institute's emphasis on practical building experience (unlike the AA, say, which starts with abstract concepts) has earned it respect. 'Architectural schools haven't paid enough attention to how buildings are put together,' says Owen Luder, president of the RIBA. 'Training students to look at buildings through detailed surveys and hands-on projects is certainly valuable,' says Richard Burdetts, director of the Architecture Foundation. `My concern is with what they will get out of their three years there that will be useful to them in today's world. You can't teach architecture as a stylistic stratagem or from a single point of view.'

None of this would matter if the Institute had been founded to train pasticheurs, con- servators and craftsmen. But the Prince's ambitions are large: to create a source of energy as influential on contemporary design as the Bauhaus was in the 1920s. The absence of that spark of intellectual excitement in the students' work so far is what so troubles the critics.